In every newspaper office, election night is always a curious mix of interminable waiting and frantic activity and the inevitable surprises.

This year's surprise was provided by the tabulation in Pope County. Our expectation was that machine counting would speed the process and that Pope County would be finished first. Our expectations seemed to be confirmed in the early part of the evening. We had a handful of results from Yell County, Johnson County and Franklin County, which was a central part of the Fifth Judicial District race for judge. In Pope County, we had 56 of 57 boxes counted by 9:30 p.m.

As the hand-counted tallies from the other counties continued to come in, the confusion about the Pope County results started.

Dale Brown, chairman of the Pope County Election Commission, said Friday that the "first red flag" was when the totals in one of the races started to decline. Later, when the tabulation was all but over, the computer-generated report on results showed only 38 of 57 precincts counted.

The commission, which also includes Portia Short and Alex Streett, then decided to recount 14 boxes. When the recount made a significant change in some races, Iva Nell Gibbons, one of five candidates for the Fifth Judicial District judgeship, asked for a hand recount, which has been scheduled for this morning. Keith Coker has also sought a recount in his challenge to District Judge Don Bourne, and that recount is set for Monday.

Brown is confident that the problems were resolved in the election night recount and that the totals will not change by much in the hand recounts.

What will change is that there will be a reaffirmation of the election process. A bipartisan crowd of more than 30 people will be handling the recount, which should remove any doubts about the outcome.

And if the outcome does change, or even if there is more variation than expected in the totals, a technician will be on hand to help the election commission track down the problem and prevent a recurrence in this fall's election.

In that event, the commission should also consider recounting another close race, the one between Betty Howard and Paula Coffman Lowe, who were seeking the Democratic nomination for county treasurer.

Either way, the quorum court may well want to consider refunding the $1,800 fee that was required of each candidate seeking a recount.

It might be expensive, but losing public confidence would be far more costly in the long run. The U.S. Supreme Court may have had some perfectly good reasons for ruling against a recount in the 2000 presidential vote in Florida, but that result will always be questioned by some who felt a recount was justified.

Here, as in Florida, every voter who makes the effort to show up at the polls needs to know that each vote gets counted as accurately as possible.